Warren: 'I was hurt, and I was angry'

Elizabeth Warren was “hurt” and “angry” about attacks on her family and ancestry in the 2012 Senate race, she writes in a new book, defending at length her characterization of her background as rooted in Native American ancestry.

Warren, the first-term Massachusetts Democratic senator, details her campaign to unseat former GOP Sen. Scott Brown in the book “A Fighting Chance.” POLITICO obtained an early copy of the book, which is set to be released on April 22.

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The book begins with some of her earliest childhood memories of growing up poor in Oklahoma and reveals personal details about the senator’s life, including her first, failed marriage. It also dives into her views on the 2008 financial crisis and her role in building the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The book’s upcoming release has already created plenty of speculation about Warren’s potential 2016 aspirations — whether she may run or at least seek to shape the political debate surrounding the presidential race.

If there was one takeaway from her 2012 Senate race for Warren, it was that the campaign trail turned out to be more brutal than she could ever have expected. Republicans questioned her integrity, her family members were dragged through the mud and her opponent mocked her appearance in a radio interview.

“What really threw me, though, were the constant attacks from the other side,” she writes about the 2012 Senate campaign. “I would almost persuade myself that I was starting to get the hang of full-throttle campaigning and then — bam! Out of left field, the state Republican Party, or the Brown campaign, or some blogger, would launch a rocket at me.”

Perhaps the most hurtful and high-profile attack thrown against Warren by Brown had to do with her heritage.

At the height of the 2012 campaign, it was reported that Warren had listed herself as having Native American roots at Harvard University. Soon, there was a “full-blown campaign frenzy,” Warren recalls, with Republicans demanding that she prove her Native-American roots and accusing her of getting her job at the elite university by making false claims about her personal background.

Caught off-guard, Warren admits that she “fumbled” when reporters first asked her about the controversy.

Things only got worse when the Brown campaign asked whether her parents had lied to their children about her family. “He attacked my dead parents,” Warren writes. “I was hurt, and I was angry.”

Brown’s allegation that Warren had used her background to get ahead “simply wasn’t true,” she writes. “I was stunned by the attacks.”

Warren devotes a section of her book — called “Native American” — to this controversy, explaining that she had simply grown up learning about her Native American background from her family and that as a kid, she had never questioned her family’s stories or asked for documentation.

“Everyone on our mother’s side — aunts, uncles, and grandparents — talked openly about their Native American ancestry,” she wrote. “My brothers and I grew up on stories about our grandfather building one-room schoolhouses and about our grandparents’ courtship and their early lives together in Indian Territory.”

“A Fighting Chance” is published by Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company. Warren’s book tour will include stops in New York City, Cambridge, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Los Angeles.

She has written several books in the past that have had more academic tilts, on issues such as bankruptcy and financial struggles of the middle class.

This latest book is more personal and provides an extensive account of Warren’s journey to Washington that captures how her life experiences helped shape her mission of leveling the playing field for average families against powerful corporations that have “rigged” the system.

In her chronicles of the high-profile campaign against Brown, Warren — who had never run for political office prior to the 2012 Senate race — is also forthright about her mistakes on the trail.

She recalls sitting down for an interview with The Daily Beast, and feeling confused to see the publication run a story under the headline: “Warren Takes Credit for Occupy Wall Street.”

“There must have been a mistake — right?” she thought, but an aide soon informed her that the reporter had correctly quoted her.

“I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they [Occupy Wall Street] do,” she had told the Daily Beast reporter. “I was deeply embarrassed. My words sounded so puffy and self-important, and they made it seem as if I were trying to take credit for a protest I wasn’t even part of.”

A big chunk of the book is devoted to Warren’s efforts in Washington following the 2008 financial crisis to create an agency to protect consumers against abuses in the markets for financial products such as mortgages and credit cards.